like in a song
by tmitnaiael
Summary: He says, "I've come to rescue you, Sansa. Like in a song."


He had remembered the Stark words but had forgotten the Tully words.

_Winter is coming_ and Robb knew, only he thought he'd _been_ the winter when he was really just a callow boy.

He learns the meaning of _family duty honor_ when his men die, when his mother dies, when his wolf dies. There is a reason _family_ is first, he discovers.

The Gods give him a reprieve. The words _Winter is coming_ spur his feet; _family duty honor_ his heart.

* * *

"I'm Alayne. Alayne Stone. Lord Petyr Baelish's bastard daughter," she says, all in one breath, after he says "Gods," and before he says, "Sansa."

His cousin Robert Arryn, the Lord of the Eyrie, has a fit when he sees Robb. After he is calmed, Sansa arranges for a bath.

Robb is scrubbed clean but Sansa frowns slightly at him. "Will you not trim your beard?"

_No no no_ "No."

* * *

Robb is breaking his fast when the world starts to spin. He's holding a fork in his hand and it's multiplying, becoming two wobbling forks then four then more, too many to count, and if he concentrates really hard it becomes one again but that's becoming harder and harder—

* * *

_The smell of blood in the air the sound of a wolf's howl in the distance the taste of bile in his throat_ mistakes mistakes mistakes.

* * *

When he wakes Sansa is standing over him, worried. He wants to reach up to touch the lines of trouble from her face, but his arm feels strange, boneless, a skin cylinder filled with sand.

"Sorry," she says, and her words seem to have come from across a chasm of thousands of miles. "Sorry, we didn't—we didn't know—"

"Didn't… know what?" he manages, voice thick and sounding like someone else's.

"…but we had to do it, it frightened Sweetrobin and he wanted to throw you out the Moon Door. 'We can't have that,' I told him, 'he's a guest, the Gods will punish us' but then he said the—the Freys weren't—for what—for what they did…"

"What didn't you know?"

"…you see, Sweetrobin desperately wants to see someone fly. I had to. He is always so difficult when my Lord Father is gone—I had to."

"What didn't you know?"

She hesitates a moment before he feels the backs of her fingers brush lightly over his cheeks, skin against skin.

They've shorn his beard.

He feels dizzy, feels his throat tighten, his lids closing. He can't see her face, wants to so badly but can't his eyelids are slipping down, down, and he needs a better look at her face—is she scared, repulsed, does she understand what she sees?

His mouth forms the words clumsily. "What have you done to me?"

"Dreamwine," she murmurs, or maybe she's speaking clearly and it's his hearing that's wrong. "Sweetrobin's, the only one we had. Too much for you, it seems. The maester thought, a man of your stature…."

"Sansa—"

"Alayne, I am Alayne."

"—everything's spinning."

* * *

A dark ring that runs 'round his neck. The scar is slightly puffy and softer than the skin around it.

He has kept his beard unruly to hide it from the stares of strangers, but mostly from himself.

The Frey's had cut off his head, sewn on Grey Wind's, nailed down his crown. A dead man had breathed life into him after the seams had been ripped out and they'd replaced his wolf's head with his own.

_Don't bother, I am a wolf, we're one and the same_ he'd have said, had anyone cared to ask.

* * *

He wakes in the night and he's half–delirious when he starts undoing her laces. He manages to get enough of her dress off to palm her breasts when Robb realizes he's mistaken his sister for his wife.

He is awake enough now and it is very obvious she is not Jeyne.

He rearranges her gown as best he can and looks up and she's awake.

"Sorry, I—did I—"

"No." Her voice is hoarse, a little breathless, and he has to tell himself he doesn't like that. "You were screaming in your sleep and I wanted to stay, in case you needed me….

"You do need me, don't you Robb? Me?"

He does, of course he does, it hurts that she must ask because this is another one of those things that is his fault.

He says, "I've come to rescue you, Sansa. Like in a song."

Her smile is a little sad and it occurs to him only later that that's not how it should be.

* * *

"He's getting stronger everyday," Sansa says proudly, as though he were her own son and not her cousin.

She sounds utterly convinced and that's what really bothers Robb. She has never been a good liar.

Sansa had looked after him last night, but this, he ascertains, is Alayne.

Sansa—or Alayne—is resolutely trying to ignore their—his—cousin's staring. Robb hopes she's faring well, because he's having a difficult time of that. The boy's gaze has been on his scar the entire meal, mouth opening and closing mechanically as Alayne feeds him.

"What is that?" he finally asks.

"No, don't—"

Robb ignores her protest. "My head was cut off—"

"—he'll have a—"

"—and then it was put back on again. If you want to know the rest I'll tell you when you're older."

His cousin is gaping. The servants are staring too.

Robb shovels food into his mouth, if only to stop from reaching up to hide the scar with his hands.

"You're lying," the boy decides finally, lip quivering. "I want to see you fly. Alayne, I want to see him fly."

"No, sweet, you—he can't. He's your cousin, your mother's sister's son. See?" She's starting to sound a little desperate. "He even has red hair and blue eyes, like Lady Lysa. Your cousin Robb."

He frowns. "Then the sky cells. For at least a day. He can't lie to the Lord of the Eyrie, even if he is my cousin."

Her voice is faint. "I don't think that's a very good idea."

_She doesn't think that's a very good idea._

Robb feels drunk, like he's downed an entire flagon of wine. "I think it sounds a great idea. Liars deserve to be punished. Anything but and he wouldn't be doing his duty. Surely you wouldn't prevent him doing his duty, Lady Alayne?"

_Family, duty, honor._

* * *

It's odd, what he remembers. He doesn't quite remember the blood, though it must have been everywhere. He remembers his fear only in nightmares, and never remembers his thoughts at all. Robb remembers the little things.

The scrape of wood chair against stone. The clatter of goblets falling, rolling away. How the light had shone on his mother's hair as she implored him to keep Grey Wind close.

* * *

The ground is hard against his stomach. His arm dangles, from the elbow down, over the edge. The wind blows his hair back, gently, almost tenderly, every now and then.

Other than that there is nothing.

Even the drop, the fall downwards hundreds of feet, is nothing.

There is nothing but the sky.

Blue. Not a painful blue. Light blue flat blue. Not the rich, multi–faceted blue of his mother's—

He stares at the sky until he forgets, until he can turn his back to it and still not remember the blue of her eyes.

(What a relief that is! The guilt the grief they had been vices around his throat and up here he finds he can breathe.)

* * *

His cell is opened and his eyes are drawn to Sansa's.

Tully blue and he remembers.

* * *

He can see the red showing through in her hair, when she sits close enough to the brazier. Those are the only times when Robert Arryn's proximity—sitting in her lap, his grubby fists in her skirts—bother Robb.

There is another boy who should be in his place.

(The little lord is family too, he reminds himself, so Robb tries to remember how to be a brother but every smile is met with a grimace and it's difficult. He has never had to fight without a sword for Sansa before.)

* * *

She forgets to be Alayne and she kisses him. It is sisterly, dry lips against his bare cheek.

He doesn't like it. It only reminds him he is beardless, that she can see his scar. Sansa should not have to suffer it. It is his burden alone.

He's still up there, in a way, in those sky cells, with his heart light and his mind empty. Maybe that's why he doesn't pull away. Maybe that's why he seeks her mouth with his own.

(Maybe he just wants to.)

Sansa's mouth is wet and a touch cold. Like catching snow on his tongue and he doesn't know how he knows but he knows _yes, that is how it should be_.

He likes this.

* * *

"You will have to go soon. My Lord Father is expected within three days. He has such plans but he hasn't factored a dead man into them. He might let Sweetrobin send you out the Moon Door. You will have to go soon."

_Your father is dead_ he doesn't say, because her back is turned and her hair is brown and she is Alayne.

* * *

He wakes in the night again. Alone this time. He has dreamt of a wedding, as he always does. In this dream he is feasting on the flesh of his brothers.

Winter is coming and Robb is chill. _The lone wolf dies._

He looks for Sansa, finds Alayne and Robert Arryn sleeping. The door shuts quietly behind him.

His feet carry him outside the castle. Robb thinks of his dream, of plucking out blue eyes from his bowl, balancing them neatly on his spoon.

He is sick out there, with the snow falling softly into his hair and the air chapping his skin.

* * *

"I am not your sister." Her whisper is fierce, harsh.

He makes to protest but then she closes her eyes. They had been blue eyes, but perhaps not Tully blue. He had thought them Tully blue, earlier, but he could have been mistaken. It would not be the first mistake he's made. And her hair is wrong. Brown. Dull.

She is right, she is not his sister.

"Alayne," he says this time, and kisses her again.

* * *

Alayne is all tooth and nail; he could mistake her for a wolf.

But then she will touch his scar with soft fingers, with the tip of her tongue. Press sweet, almost chaste kisses to it. Soft smooth licks.

She chases it, for all he runs from it.

"It's a part of you," she tells him once, voice pitched low. "You musn't forget that, who you are," he thinks she goes on to say, but isn't sure it's hard to concentrate when she's touching him.

* * *

He used to think—to dream—about roads not taken. Trading the Kingslayer, keeping Theon close, marrying a Frey.

He doesn't anymore.

He thinks instead of his hands. He had thought them a wolf's paws, a warrior's callused palms, a king's hands.

They are, Robb knows now, a broken sieve.

Everything had slipped through his fingers.

(Not everything though; there is still more, still slipping but there is too much misery in his past and just enough peace in his present that he has forgotten this even when it is set before him barely hidden.)

* * *

Another time she says, "Not all scars are visible. Did you know that, Robb?"

He can't find the words to answer that because she's fisted her hands in his hair and is scraping her teeth along his jaw and she makes his breath catch in his throat.

"It's not a bad thing, though," she muses as she shrugs out her shift. "You can know a man if you know his scars. Did you know that, Robb? Like how I know you. And if you know a man—"

Her hand comes to rest over his chest for a moment, like she's feeling for his heartbeat, but if she is she checks the wrong side.

"—well, I suppose the point is…you didn't know, did you, Robb?"

Her hand strokes his cheek as he says, "No I didn't."

She laughs, light, fluttery, nearly a giggle. It almost sounds familiar but Robb does not know why.

* * *

She closes her eyes when he opens his, opens her eyes when he closes his.

Robb means to rescue Sansa but he's always missing her.


End file.
